title: Grammatical abilities in Parkinson's disease: evidence from written sentences.
abstract: This study examined the grammatical content of written sentences elicited from 96 Parkinson's patients, 30 Parkinson's with dementia patients and 167 control subjects. Parkinson's patients without dementia or with mild dementia presented no impairments in sentence length, syntactic complexity or amount of information content. Moderately demented Parkinson's patients showed reduced sentence length and information content but normal syntactic complexity. This pattern of results provides evidence that lexical-semantic content is more susceptible to decline than syntactic structure with the progression of dementia in Parkinson's disease.
authors.affiliation: Gerontology Center, University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA.
authors.forename: J A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Small
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lyons
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kemper
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D003704:Dementia / Q000150:complications / Q000523:psychology; D006236:Handwriting; D006801:Humans; D010300:Parkinson Disease / Q000150:complications / Q000523:psychology*; D011594:Psychometrics; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*